


In Good Time

by emily_grant



Category: Magic Tales
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-28
Updated: 2013-09-28
Packaged: 2017-12-27 21:42:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/983942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emily_grant/pseuds/emily_grant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the events of Knight's Castle, Martha and Katharine have a sisterly chat - and come to some startling realizations</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Good Time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Moontyger](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Moontyger/gifts).



“The children aren’t playing with the castle and things anymore,” Katharine said, pouring herself and her sister a second cup of coffee.

Martha, still seated at the table, smiled to herself. “No.” In fact, they were all outside today, bursting with youth and energy and joyous relief that their beloved father and uncle was going to be all right.

She felt rather like bursting herself over it, but she couldn’t bring herself to be quite as unconventional as Jane (who wired to say she turned half a dozen cartwheels when she heard the news), and so instead just accepted that second cup of coffee with a sense of daring. At home she only ever allowed herself one a day.

“Did you think there was anything … funny … in the way they were all playing together, and the stories they were making up, and how seriously they were taking it all?” Katharine’s casual tone was starting to sound a little forced.

Martha, in a move learned from Mark when she was ten, and practiced faithfully since, raised one eyebrow. “Did you?”

“Well, frankly, yes. Jack and Eliza aren’t usually so good about such things. I mean, Eliza was even involved with the dolls’ house!” Katharine looked down and concentrated very hard on pouring the cream into her cup drop by drop. “And another thing …”

Martha hid a sigh. Her sister was not going to let her bask in this glorious morning, apparently. Always fussing over something, that was Katharine!

Still, she had been awfully good to them all during this hideous, horrible time, so Martha straightened up and put on a politely interested face.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, dear,” Katharine said. “But do you think it’s odd at all that Fred seems to be recovering so well, beyond the wildest hopes of any of the doctors?”

Martha stuck her chin out. “No,” she said. “I don’t. Fred has always had a marvelous constitution.”

Katharine smiled but persisted. “Yes, dear, but listen. Do you think … now don’t think I’m going crazy, because I know you remember our childhood as clearly as I do … do you think, maybe, something a little, well, a little _unusual_ happened with the children this week, something that affected Fred?”

Martha set her cup down and sat up straighter. “Do talk plainly, Katharine,” she said. “You think magic is involved.”

Katharine winced. By common agreement, none of the siblings ever talked about their childhood adventures once said adventures had ended.

But then, Martha had never been good at agreements, unspoken or otherwise, when they stopped making sense.

“I hadn’t thought that,” she admitted now candidly. “But I suppose anything’s possible.” She was _not_ going to tell Katharine how, in those first few terrible days after Fred was diagnosed, she had gone into every pet store she could find, whispering “O turtle” at each aquarium in hopes of finding one to grant her a wish.

Or how she had inspected every coin in the house, just in case one was a talisman.

Alas, magic, it seemed, was really only for children, while adults had to settle for dull reality. Yet even with that, it hadn’t occurred to her until just now that her own children might have found some magic to help their father (and get themselves in several messes along the way, if she knew anything at all about magic!).

It made sense, though—inasmuch as anything with magic made sense.

“Magic with toys?” she said now. “A magic castle? Magic toy soldiers? I refuse to believe in magic dolls.”

“Whyever not?” Katharine said, then abandoned that line. “Or those books Jane sent might have been magic. Or another talisman, like the nickel-that-wasn’t-a-nickel.”

“But how do you suppose it happened?” Martha persisted. “Do you think … I mean, the turtle told us magic comes in threes, but we never got our third adventure.” That still rankled. “Do you suppose they were the third? Or is it just a _coincidence_ that our children happen to have found magic just like we did when we were young?” She paused and mused. “Or were found by magic, if it was anything like our adventures.”

Katharine gasped and set the coffee cup down with such a clatter Martha was sure she had broken it. Her face was white underneath its perfectly applied makeup, and her eyes were wild and staring.

At first, Martha thought she was having a fit. “Katharine!” she said, and the sound of her voice brought her sister back to reality.

“Oh my,” she said weakly. “Oh my.”

“What?” Martha demanded.

“I haven’t thought of it in years. Certainly not when I named them. Not even when Ann came along and completed the cousinly foursome. Not until just now, when you mentioned the turtle, and magic coming in threes, and our adventures …”

“Stop babbling,” Martha said impatiently. “And explain.”

Katharine leaned forward, despite the fact that they were alone in the dining room and even if they weren’t, their previous conversation would have sounded crazy enough as it was to anyone listening. “ _The desert island and the pirate treasure_ ,” she hissed. “The three children who rescued us! And two were only plain to you, and one to me, and Mark and Jane thought they all looked misty, and their names were …”

Martha wasn’t positive, but she rather thought she might have paled, too. She felt pale. “Roger, Ann, and Eliza.” No wonder her children’s names had sounded so absolutely right to her when she thought of them! “They might have been named that in another life,” she had told Fred, and now she shuddered to think how close she had come to the truth.

“But that wasn’t now,” she said. “I mean, it couldn’t have happened for them now. Obviously it’s our past. But their present. Except it’s not. It has to be their future.” Goodness, now she was the one babbling. Thankfully, Katharine seemed to understand.

“How do you know?”

“Ann,” Martha said simply. It had been a long, long time ago—for her—but she still remembered seeing Roger and Ann appear on that beach, and the wonderful, fun conversation she had had with Ann even while tied to that spear. And she knew Ann wasn’t yet the age she had been then. “It’ll be soon,” she said. “But it wasn’t this bit of magic, whatever this was.”

Katharine was thinking of something else. “I wonder where Jack was? Will be, I mean. Oh dear, I do hope he wasn’t—won’t be—off getting into trouble somewhere.”

“Well, you can hardly change it if he was. Or will be,” Martha said. “It’s the past.”

“Yes, but if I change the future, would the past change as well? Would there suddenly be four children on the beach to rescue us?” Katharine wondered. “Would our memories change? Would this conversation change? Maybe he was there at one point, but I did something as a parent that I was or wasn’t meant to, and so now he isn’t, and I need to fix it to make him be there again.”

Martha put her hand to her head. “Stop,” she said. “You’ll only drive us both mad by speculating.” She smiled, thinking how much she was going to enjoy having a conversation with Ann, in a year’s time or so, about magic.

“But what do you suppose will bring them there? And if that’s their second magical adventure, assuming they did have one just now, and we had our two magical adventures, and magic comes in threes, does that mean there’s a third magical adventure in store for all of us? Do you suppose it’s even possible for adults to have magical adventures?” Katharine’s eyes glowed, and for a moment she looked just like her grubby-kneed, nail-bitten, childhood self, about to show Lancelot up on the tourney field.

Martha smiled and sipped her coffee. “I suppose,” she said, “only time will tell.”


End file.
